Wednesday, July 03, 2013

We assembled, your typical Gaulois family – we got our
warcarts, our cattle, our dyepots and our spears together – and made it down to
Roquette, where I was to be interviewed, examined, and finally issued my visa
for a year. First, I watched a film that told some white lies about liberty,
equality, and fraternity (illustrating the latter, to the sound of Robespierre
turning in his grave, with scenes from a football match), and then was called
out to have my lungs xrayed, my eyes examined (the examination card, in a nice
touch, contained, in its small print section, what seemed to be a prose poem
about beauty), and my personal history and that of my family extracted: I
claimed that there was no inherited schizophrenia, hebephrenia, pyromania,
nymphomania, or anthropophagous warts in my family tree, and that I had never
had a serious illness, never drank alcohol (except when I could find it – I added
this silent codicil in my own mind), and was as healthy as a horse.After which,
I was called into the office of the nicest case officer ever, who said that my
record showed that I could skip the classes on logement, typing, woodwork,
sheepherding, and abbatoir science, but that I would have to assist on a
program on French civics, including the dread explanation of how the French
elect the senate. In preparation for the latter, the case officer gave me a
textbook on logarithms and another on non-Euclidean geometry. We were about to
rise in our chairs and sing Ca ira when she noticed that I had made a gross blunder
on my application sheet. Normally, I would have been quartered for this
mistake, but instead, I was showered with such courtesy and understanding that
I swore to make encore un autre effort and like rillettes, or die trying. An
excellent day. Iam in!

About Me

MANY YEARS LATER as he faced the firing squad, Roger Gathman was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover
ice. Or rather, to discover the profit making potential of selling bags of ice to picnicking Atlantans, the most glorious of the old man's Get Rich schemes, the one that devoured the most energy, the one that seemed so rational for a time, the one that, like all the others - the farm, the housebuilding business, the plastic sign business, chimney cleaning, well drilling, candy machine renting - was drawn by an inexorable black hole that opened up between skill and lack of business sense, imagination and macro-economics, to blow a huge hole in the family savings account. But before discovering the ice machine at 12, Roger had discovered many other things - for instance, he had a distinct memory of learning how to tie his shoes. It was in the big colonial, a house in the Syracuse metro area that had been built to sell and that stubbornly wouldn't - hence, the family had moved into it. He remembered bending over the shoes, he remembered that clumsy feeling in his hands - clumsiness, for the first time, had a habitation, it was made up of this obscure machine, the shoe, and it presaged a lifetime of struggle with machine after machine.